#ps lamill sucks

[slow-fires-blog-blog]

some scattered thoughts on coffee shops

“The character of a third place is determined most of all by its regular clientele and is marked by a playful mood, which contrasts with people’s more serious involvement in other spheres. Though a radically different kind of setting for a home, the third place is remarkably similar to a good home in the psychological comfort and support that it extends…They are the heart of a community’s social vitality, the grassroots of democracy, but sadly, they constitute a diminishing aspect of the American social landscape.” 

- Ray Oldenburg

Los Angeles has no shortage of third places. It may not seem so, given the city’s reputation for dismal stretches of street frontage and lukewarm attitude towards public life, but third places are more present throughout the city than we think. They may be spread out across the city, but each neighborhood has its fixture, from Atwater Village to Venice Beach. They’ve served as habitats for its characters: cue the trope of the aspiring screenwriter or novelist scrawling away in the corner of a tiny coffee shop, a standard of Los Angeles’ dramatis personae since Old Hollywood’s golden years, although you’ll be more likely to find them with their noses buried in netbooks instead of notebooks in 2014.

Coffee shops are by no means Los Angeles’ only species of third place, but they are certainly its most visible. Social media websites allow Angelenos to “claim” a third space, evaluating the atmosphere, food, coffee, and crowd and announcing their presences there to the digital sphere. Blogs periodically publish lists of the best coffee shops in the city for obtaining latte art, working, dating, people-watching, or being people-watched, and the overambitious, underemployed young creatives of the city descend in waves upon those garnished with the most praise.

You can frequent a coffee shop or call it your favorite, but it belongs equally to everyone not in its employ. Third places are both no-man’s land and neutral ground, suitable for introductions and armistices. Contrary to what Foursquare.com would have you believe, you can’t “own” a coffee shop unless your name is on the lease. For this reason, there is no more appropriate space to catch up with acquaintances, schedule first dates, or hold work meetings that desperately try to be about anything but work.

We should treasure our coffee shops. Your local neighborhood third place is more than a check-in on your phone, a shell where you disappear completely into your screen of choice. It's a place where you can work, but feel like you're at home. A third place mediates between work and home, filling in the cracks between to make a neighborhood's identity whole.

Dispassionately saying Cognoscenti and Intelligentsia just for the sake of doing so tires out the vocal chords really quickly, so save some gas along with your breath and bring your laptop to the java shack around the corner. Coffee shops are not merely a name to drop, but an integral part of the urban fabric that also often creates knots and collisions within it. That’s a good thing, in a world where reasonable amounts of conflict and confusion are crucial to growth.